


The Treehouse

by tacroy



Category: The Chronicles of Chrestomanci - Diana Wynne Jones
Genre: F/F, Trans Female Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-04
Updated: 2018-08-04
Packaged: 2019-06-21 15:28:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15560823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tacroy/pseuds/tacroy
Summary: Christina had an inkling. Given enough lumber, nails, and tools, she rather suspected she could build a treehouse.





	The Treehouse

**Author's Note:**

> There is a point you reach in being queer where you must decide whether you will mourn who you could have been or embrace who you will become. This is a little story about that point, and how it goes to reach that with someone.

Christina had an inkling. Given enough lumber, nails, and tools, she rather suspected she could build a treehouse.

“This seems unlikely,” Millie said. Her hands were fisted on her hips, and her mouth was set in an unconvinced line. “You are much more likely to injure yourself than build any sort of structure, much less one suspended entire meters off the ground.”

They were squared off against each other in the door to the library, where Christina had been reading a book that merely mentioned treehouses. Conrad, who had come in for a copy of Proust, rolled his eyes extravagantly from the midst of the stacks. 

Regardless of the erroneous opinions of onlookers, sentiments such as Millie’s were not to be tolerated—especially now. Christina eyed Millie coldly. Without saying a word, she flipped her hair and marched off to the workshop.

An hour and a half and fourteen splinters later, Christina thought she might need to go back to the drawing board, or rather, find one, as she had not quite had a firm plan in mind before setting hammer to tree. 

Nursing her thumb, she stalked to the library, hoping Millie was nowhere near. She ensconced herself in a dark corner with a lamp, an armchair, two treatises on engineering and a brief guide to carpentry. 

Millie found her there hours later, napping on _The Complete Book of Structural Integrity_. Her short black hair was splayed out like a fan around her sharp face, and she was drooling a bit on the book. 

“Christina,” said Millie.

Nothing.

“ _Christina_ ,” said Millie. 

Christina snored a bit, and a piece of hair fluffed up and landed in the puddle of drool.

Millie kicked the chair. Christina shrieked and fell out of it.

There was quite a lot of yelling for a while. Books were thrown. Fingers were pointed. _Ad hominem_ attacks were viciously lobbed. 

Unfortunately, it was nothing out of the ordinary.

Quite often, Christina’s tactic for ending arguments was to piss the other party off enough that they’d storm away. This was a risky endeavor at the best of times in Chrestomanci Castle, where outsized personalities were common. Employing this defense with the formerly Living Asheth was an entirely separate sort of peril. Eventually, Millie stalked out of the library, leaving a bit of Christina’s hair on fire and two tables upside down.

Her pride resisted, but Christina chalked it up to a win. She was just trying to be realistic.

At dinner that night, Millie sat very pointedly on the opposite end of the table from Christina, who’d had to take three baths to get the smoke out of her hair. Reactions in the dining room ranged from utterly clueless (Gabriel) to wary (Mordecai) to amused (Flavian). Rosalie tried to get them to talk to each other. Conrad went from Millie to Christina with conversational bits, becoming increasingly frustrated. Millie carved her turkey with bloodthirsty relish while Christina chopped her broccoli into tiny, tiny pieces and they remained, resolutely, silent.

That night, Christina scrubbed her face much too roughly in the bathroom off her bedroom as she muttered invectives, entirely unaware that she was doing this aloud. She tried to consider how _wrong_ things had been going between herself and Millie recently, but there was too much smoke and flame to see the state of the trees. A knock at the door snapped her out of her haze.

Christina draped a hand towel over her shoulder. Her hair was still damp from the bath earlier and she hadn’t plaited it up yet like she normally did. Her soft blue robe, embroidered with glittering constellations, was stuck to her back and fell open at the front, and she was pulling it closed as she opened the door.

It was Conrad, looking grim and holding someone right outside of Christina’s line of sight. Conrad’s hair was sticking up as if he’d been in some sort of tussle. He tugged and Millie fell into view, dressed in an extremely Victorian nightgown with her hair piled on top of her head.

“ _Talk_ to her,” he hissed at Millie.

“No!” Millie yelled, bright red. She clawed Conrad’s hand off of her upper arm and glared. “She’s being an absolute idiot! I _refuse_ to talk about this. All I did was tell her that she couldn’t build a tree house and I was _right_!”

Christina flew through the door. “You threw a book at my face!” she shrieked. “You don’t think I can do _anything_!”

“That’s because you can’t do anything!” Millie howled. “You’re a stuck-up peacock with no impulse control and a ocean-full of undeserved overconfidence!”

“You’re _ruining_ my life!” Christina screeched in return. “Ever since I’ve met you, it’s been one damn thing after another—it’s a circus around you! How am I supposed to set up any sort of routine?”

“You think that’s _my_ fault?” Millie gasped. “You’re the one wrecking everything! You think you’re all that just because you lucked out and get to die as often as a cat! You wouldn’t let me alone when I wanted to go to school in Switzerland that I might have had a chance at if I hadn’t fallen in with the likes of you!”

“As if you could have ever expected to just slot right in at that hellhole!” Christina bellowed. “You’re not even _from_ this world!”

Conrad balled up his fists and shouted: “SHUT UP!”

It rang down the hall. They shut up.

“Okay,” said Conrad slowly. “You are both idiots and you’ve been fighting for two months. So please, for the love of peace, get over this so I don’t have to murder both of you.”

Christina opened her mouth and Conrad pointed at her violently. “No! No more!” Millie shifted her weight a bit and Conrad whipped around to point at her, scowling elaborately. “Absolutely not! Figure this out!” Still pointing, he backed down the hallway. It took at least twenty seconds until he was out of sight.

Millie crossed her arms and turned to Christina. “I think it’s obvious what the problem is,” she said. “You think I’ve ruined your life.”

Christina slammed the door in Millie’s face.

=

Approaching storms did not stop Christina from attempting the treehouse again the next day.

“One… two… three… four…” Christina counted to herself as she nailed a board into a branch. Then thunder boomed around her so loudly that she almost fell out of the tree. After two hours, she’d almost finished the base of the treehouse and had only smashed her left thumb, left pointer, and right pinky. 

“What the hell are you doing?” someone yelled from below. Christina dropped the nail she was holding, put her hand briefly over her heart, and leaned over the plywood.

It was Millie. Arms crossed, she scowled up at Christina from beneath an absolute cloud of hair that the wind had whipped loose of its tie. 

“What?” Christina yelled. “What do you want? Go away!”

“It’s lightninging!” Millie shouted back. “You could get hit!”

“It’s four miles away!” Christina returned. “I’m fine!”

“I don’t understand why you’re even building that,” Millie said. It was so quiet that Christina couldn’t even be sure she’d heard it. “We’re not _kids_ anymore.”

Christina picked up her hammer again. “Don’t be an idiot,” she snapped, looking back to the board she was nailing in. “We were never really kids.”

She hit the board so hard it cracked. When she looked down again, Millie was gone.

=

When she came in an hour later, she was soaked to the bone. The sky had simply opened up. Wordlessly, Millie met her at the door with a soft, thick, peacock purple robe and took her up to her room, where she peeled Christina’s overdress off. The clothes steamed. Christina shook the rest of her things off in the bathroom and wrapped a different soft, bright robe around herself and tied her wet hair up out of her face.

Millie was sitting on her bed when she came out, staring out the window at the storm.

“I tried to be a kid,” Millie said. She kicked her feet idly, her slippers flopping on her toes. “I went to that nice school. I had this formula, you know? Be Millie. Have chums. Be a prefect. Have adventures and go on holiday.” She sighed. “It didn’t just work because the school was terrible. It didn’t work because that’s not who I am and it’s not who I ever was.” She looked at Christina, who was still standing in the doorway, holding her arms around herself. “I thought—here’s this girl that’s just like me. She’s been through hell. Her whole family—her whole world—lied to her and and she never knew what normal was. She’s too young with too much _and_ too little power. Maybe we have all these things in common.”

Millie stood up and went to the window. She leaned her forehead against it and the glass in front of her mouth fogged. “And we did. And we had fun. And we were so _not_ normal together that everything started to feel normal. Didn’t it?”

Christina’s mouth was dry. “Yes,” she said. “It did feel normal.”

Millie shook her head. “But it never was. We’ve never been normal. And we’ve never been kids. And we’ll never be kids.”

She walked towards the door. “Make sure you dry yourself,” she said. “I don’t want you to catch a cold.”

“Millie,” Christina said. Millie stopped with her hand on the door handle.

Christina swallowed again, trying to find her voice. “We don’t have to be like everyone else,” she said.

“Don’t we?” Millie said. She smiled, gentle and sad, and left, and closed the door behind her.

=

When the sun came out, Christina went back outside. This time she brought gloves. 

She’d built two walls and was trying to figure out the door when movement caught her attention. It was a lunch basket, levitating at eye level.

“Want some nosh?” a voice said.

Christina let down a rope ladder she’d put together the previous evening, and Millie climbed up. Lunch was half a loaf of bread, thick sharp cheese, and huge slices of cured ham that they ate in silence, legs swinging over the side of the platform.

The great lawn rolled down in front of them, bright green from yesterday’s rain. At the bottom of the hill, the chimneys of the village worked, and they could see people in the streets and shops and houses. Millie’s shoes were her fourth-best pair and her dress was a drab, comfortable green. 

“I don’t think I ever particularly _wanted_ to be normal,” Christina said. “I did for a bit when I went to school and I just wanted to fit in. I think I always sort of knew, at the bottom, that I wasn’t going to have a normal life, no matter how I felt about it.” Her throat tightened. “And I got my hopes up when I came here, you know? Everything was so chaotic and awful and I hated everyone and everything but at least I still had… well, I still had them in the dark, didn’t I? And then Uncle Ralph had to show up and scream at everyone that their new Chrestomanci was a boy in girl’s clothing.”

Millie pressed her arm against Christina’s. 

“I’m mad at you for the stupidest possible reason,” Christina said. “I’m mad at you because you’re not going to ever let me lead a normal life.”

Mille put her head on Christina’s shoulder. “I know. That’s why I’m ticked at you too. I got so pissed when you were bragging at dinner about the treehouse. I don’t know what got into me.” She straightened up and stared off across the lawn. “I just got so upset about the idea that you might be trying to climb back into something normal. That you were sticking your nose in the air like, ‘Oh, look at me, I may be the Chrestomanci-in-waiting but aren’t I relatable? Aren’t I just a kid?’ And it got me so incensed because you never were, and I never was, and I was mad at you and me and our families and everything we’ve been through.”

“When really,” Christina said, “I just wanted to build a treehouse.”

Millie eyed her.

“I really did!” Christina protested. “I was reading a Molly Milton book and she had a treehouse and I thought—wouldn’t that be a good place to throw eggs at Conrad from?”

“Fair point,” Millie said, laughing. “He walks this way down to the village, doesn’t he?”

“Every other day,” Christina said.

Then, very slowly, Christina reached over and took Millie’s hand. They looked at each other.

“I think,” Millie said carefully, “that we need not mourn the loss of a normalcy we were never going to have.”

She drew in close to Christina. They pressed their foreheads together.

“There are no constraints on the extraordinary,” Millie said.

They finished the treehouse together, that evening. Conrad told them it was perfect. (Little did he know.) They agreed, though, and sat together on the edge of it again, and watched the sunset over the village, and kissed each other goodnight.


End file.
